Social cognition psychology

Although Social cognition psychology aspects of psychology, such as perception, learning, and memory, can be generalized across species, the field of social cognition deals exclusively with thoughts and behaviors that are arguably uniquely human.

This ability to work out what other people are thinking is known as theory of mind and is a core component of human social cognition Arguably, the capacity sets humans apart from other species and makes them different.

The simplest way of thinking about schemas is to imagine that the brain contains many locked filing cabinets, with numerous files stored within each cabinet.

How special is social cognition as compared with other cognitive processes? Even though we believe that social influences are pervasive, a wide definition is not useful. This dynamic relationship between cognition and social experience means that social cognition affects almost every area of human existence.

Within evolutionary biology, social cognition includes processes such as learning and memory in a social context, with respect, for example, to territoriality in animals, dominance and subordination within the social structure and the complexities of living in a group leading to social pressures and stress.

According to this view, when we see or think of a concept a mental representation or schema is "activated" bringing to mind other information which is linked to the original concept by association. The Bantu herdsmen was able to distinguish his cattle from dozens of others, while the Scottish settler was not.

How do we determine the causes of our own behavior and that of others? Social cognition means different things to different people. This is one area whereby the alien Todf may, on the surface, appear to have a slight advantage over people.

The alien on the other hand, completely clueless about the vagaries of human social behavior, may consider retirement homes as an ideal place to sell the tickets, as there is a captive audience of potential buyers with disposable income.

Would such a person be able to cope with everyday social situations? Clearly, the study of such processes needs to be influenced, if not carried out, by scientists from a variety of disciplines.

Within developmental psychology, it is often assumed that the factors governing cognitive performance in terms of interactions with others are a product of individual cognitive abilities and social competence.

This may influence social cognition and behaviour regardless of whether these judgements are accurate or not. Among other things, researchers in this field study how people encode social information, how such information is mentally organized and stored, and how we use social knowledge to form opinions and make decisions regarding ourselves and others.

People would be treated as unique entities and social interaction would be free from discrimination.

Without such a capacity, successful social interaction would be impossible. Stereotyping involves the generalization of specific features, beliefs, or properties to entire groups of people e. Social psychology attempts to explain the broad social aspects of human experience — how individuals influence and are influenced by the presence of others as well as the social situations in which they find themselves.

As a result of activating such schemas, judgements are formed which go beyond the information actually available, since many of the associations the schema evokes extend outside the given information.

Historical development[ edit ] Social cognition came to prominence with the rise of cognitive psychology in the late s and early s and is now the dominant model and approach in mainstream social psychology.

It also prevents irrelevant knowledge from entering consciousness at the wrong time. Based on the foregoing, social cognition could be defined simply as a cognitive approach to studying social experience.

Researchers are currently investigating the brain basis of these cognitive deficits. Social cognition draws heavily on material within cognitive psychology and social psychology to examine the relationship between basic cognitive operations and fundamental social problems.

We can be consciously aware of these representations but mostly we are unaware of them.

The development of social cognitive processes in infants and children has also been researched extensively see developmental psychology. Social cognition therefore applies and extends many themes, theories, and paradigms from cognitive psychology that can be identified in reasoning representativeness heuristicbase rate fallacy and confirmation biasattention automaticity and priming and memory schemas, primacy and recency.Social cognition is a broad term used to describe cognitive processes related to the perception, understanding, and implementation of linguistic, auditory, visual, and physical cues that communicate emotional and interpersonal information.

Social cognition is a sub-topic of social psychology that focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in our social interactions. Quite simply, cognition refers to thinking.

There are the obvious applications of conscious reasoning—doing taxes, playing chess, deconstructing Macbeth—but thought takes. Social cognition is a sub-field within the larger discipline of social psychology and has been defined as “the study of mental processes involved in perceiving, attending to, remembering, thinking about, and making sense of the people in our social world” (Moscowitz,p.3).

Social cognition allows people to read the faces of other people and enables them to decode the contents of their minds. Imagine the alien Todf in a classroom with children ages 5 or 6 years old.